


Colours Abound

by theyalwayssay



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Destiel - Freeform, Graduation, It's So Cliche, M/M, My First Work in This Fandom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-24
Updated: 2013-09-24
Packaged: 2017-12-27 12:09:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/978688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theyalwayssay/pseuds/theyalwayssay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean and Cas are best friends, through drunken nights and hospital visits. And something about that fact fills Cas up like drink. And while high school graduation may be an ending, it is by no means the end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Colours Abound

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first Destiel fic, not to mention my first Supernatural fic, so I thought I'd start off with something easy. And, as a graduating Senior, there's nothing easier to write then a good old high school AU. Nevertheless, please be nice.

The robe was polyester. Scratchy, itchy, stifling polyester.

His last day of high school, and he was surrounded by his male classmates in sweaty dresses, one or two of them rumoured to be naked underneath.

Of course, that was simply rumour. It would depend on how drunk the guys had been when they made the bet that if the stoner of the grade managed to get into a college, the group of Ivy League jocks would wear nothing under their graduation robes. The black fabric stretched all the way to the floor, covering what was either bare skin or trousers beneath them. Cas wriggled his toes in his shoes, brushing the trouser fabric ever so slightly with his fingertips, as though making sure they were still there.

“Last day of school, bitches!” came a loud cry from the other end of the room. Cas looked around to see Dean flounce in. The jocks all yelled jovially, crowding around and smacking him on the back. Cas waited until Dean had extricated himself from the crowd before walking over to him, his arms folded.

“Where have you been?”

“I just got held up, Cas. Don’t worry about it,” Dean said, walking past Cas and slapping him on the ass with his mortarboard as he brushed past him. Cas blushed, his lips compressed tightly.

“Can’t you be on time just once in your life?” he asked, spinning around to face his friend. “You can’t keep doing this. I thought you’d gotten drunk again or something.”

Dean stiffened, and he scowled when he turned back to face him. “That was one time. Let it go.”

Cas couldn’t let it go. And he was certain that it hadn’t been the only time, but it had been the only time where Cas was present. He had known that there was a huge Senior party, but he didn’t expect Dean to be going until he got a phonecall at midnight.

“Cas!” came a slurred voice from the other end of the line.

“You can’t be serious,” was his response.

“Dude, what day is it?”

“It’s the 20th.”

“No, like the day of the week.”

"Are you drunk?"

"Come on, the day."

“Wednesday.”

“Nope. No, no, no, it’s-”

“I’m coming to get you.”

“No, but dude, it’s hu-”

“Shut up. I’m leaving now.”

It had taken him ten minutes to get to the house, and by that time most of the party had been moved out into the front lawn. Whether all the neighbors were on vacation or didn’t mind the noise, there seemed to be nothing that was preventing the wild, screaming teenagers from spreading over the grass like locusts. Dean was easy enough to find, sprawled out on the grass, his shoes hidden among the bushes and his jeans rolled up to his knees, drinking a beer that one of the cheerleaders was pouring into his mouth. Cas pushed roughly through the small crowd and pulled Dean to his feet. His eyes took a few seconds to focus on him.

“Cas! What the hell, dude? Why are you here?”

“I’m coming to get you. We have school tomorrow and you’re wasted.”

“So what, man? We’re seniors!” he shouted, and half the lawn cheered, and then groaned as Dean leaned over and vomited onto the grass.

“Shit,” Cas said, pulling him towards the curb where his car was parked. He pulled open the door with one hand, reaching in and pulling out the bottle of water he’d thrown in the backseat.

“Drink it.”

“I don’t want to.”

Cas sighed heavily. “Dean, you just threw up. How much did you drink?”

“Shit, I don’t know. Seven.”

“Seven of what?”

“Alcohol. Seven alcohol.”

“Just drink the water, Dean.”

“Whatever, man. I hate water. And you know who else hates water? Jesus.” His breath was hot and dizzying against Cas’s neck. “That’s why he turned it all to wine.”

And he licked a stripe up Cas’s cheek.

“Get in the car,” Cas said, pushing him roughly into the passenger seat and slamming the door behind him. He walked around the hood of the car, wiping at his cheek with his hand and feeling the flush burn his fingertips. He slammed the driver’s door and sighed, not even noticing the beer can that flew out of the darkness and hit the hood with a wet clang. He looked over at Dean, who was slumped against the headrest, his face covered in beer and sick.

“Here,” Cas said, pulling off his shirt and handing it to Dean. “Clean your face and don’t be a bitch about it.”

Dean stared at the shirt for a moment, then grabbed it and smeared it messily over his face. Cas turned the engine on and rolled the windows down as he drove away from the house, hoping the crisp wind would dispel the stink of sick and beer, even though he was already shivering. Dean slumped back against the seat, Cas’s shirt hanging from his hand by a finger caught in the neckline. There wasn’t a sound but the chirp of crickets and the hum of the engine.

“Dean, say something so I know whether you’re dead or sleeping,” Cas said. It was a moment or two before he got a reply.

“Dude, you’re ripped. How come you never told me? I could totally have gotten you some chick to bang. Hell, I’d bang you if I wasn’t a dude.”

“Sorry, what?” Cas asked. He took his eyes away from the road, but Dean had already fallen asleep, his chest rising and falling lightly, his mouth slightly open.

Cas blinked. Dean was still glaring at him, his mortarboard now sitting lopsidedly on his head. The tassel hung down over his nose comically. “I only ask because you were a dick when it happened. You’re a mean drunk,” Cas explained, reaching over and flipping the tassel out of his friend’s eyes.

“Everyone’s mean to you. Don’t be such a pansy and it won’t be a problem,” Dean replied, smirking. Cas raised his hands in mock defensiveness.

“At least my Facebook picture isn’t me with a butterfly on my nose.”

“You took that picture.”

“Yes, because it was awesome. You were asleep anyway, you didn’t get to see it. Plus, your snore scared it away.”

It had happened on Senior skip day. While the rest of the class went to see a movie, Dean and Cas had gone to the park. Dean had already seen the movie and Cas had no interest in seeing it, and besides, it was such a nice day. Dean drove to a secluded spot in a grove of tall trees, resting against one of the trunks while Cas read. In fact, he read for so long that he didn’t even notice the butterflies until one landed on his book before flitting away. He looked up, and noticed an identical butterfly sitting on the tip of Dean’s nose, flapping lazily in the way butterflies do, like the breeze was so strong they couldn’t stay in the same place for too long. Cas had reached into his pocket as quietly has he could and pulled out his phone, snapping a picture before the creature flew away. It looked so peaceful, Dean’s lashes against his tan cheeks, the butterfly’s wings stretched across his face like a colourful mask that was too small for him. After they left the park and parted ways, Cas texted Dean the picture. “This is why you should fall asleep,” he had written. “You miss things.”

The next day, Dean had changed his profile picture. “At the park with Cas,” he wrote in the description, and Cas tried very hard not to smile too wide when he saw it.

“So, does that make me the ultimate pansy?” Dean asked, leaning against the wall.

“Yes. You’re such a pansy that the butterflies mistake you for a flower,” Cas replied coolly.

“Maybe it’s just because my breath smells like flowers,” Dean said, leaning forward and breathing heavily on Cas’s face.

“Gross, Dean. I don’t want to smell your breath!” Cas said, pushing Dean off of him. Dean laughed.

“Oh, for God’s sake, get a room, you two!” called Anna from across the room, her red hair shocking against the white collar of the robe. “Or at least just kiss him now, Dean. It’s your last day to do it, anyway.”

“Don’t be a bitch, Anna. This is the guy’s room anyway, so I suggest you leave before I kick you in the balls,” Dean called back. Dean and Anna had never gotten along very well, ever since Dean punched her in the nose for calling Cas gay in middle school. He had gotten suspended for three days, and when he came back, he had held Cas’s hand fiercely to and from school every day, as though daring someone to say something about it. That was the sort of person Dean was. He was the first one in the class to start driving, bringing his little brother Sam to school in a vintage black car. He got in fights. He ate lots of meat and wore a leather jacket and swore and flirted with every girl in school. And somehow, miraculously, he had chosen Cas to be his best friend. Cas, who was unextraordinary in every possible way. Even bees died of boredom around him.

That was, of course, before what had happened last year. Things were always complicated in Junior year, always stressful, always lonesome. Cas had gotten the worst of it. The teachers considered him to be the brightest student in the grade, and decided that he should be required to take four AP classes as well as all Honors courses. As if that wasn’t stressful enough, his brothers had started fighting. Cas was the youngest among them, and was not necessarily caught up in the squabbles rather than dragged along, like a balloon tied to the tail of a rabid wolf. The fighting had escalated from raised voices and stony silences to slamming doors and empty bedrooms for days at a time, and then to broken noses and bruised knuckles. The more everyone left the house, the longer Cas stayed in it, retreating into his dark room, into himself. He stopped sleeping, stopped eating. He walked around like a ghost, eyes hollow and dark, like a corpse that was just waiting for the heart to realize that everything else had given up. In a way, he became more sentimental during that time, remembering happiness like an old friend who had died. But his other friends were busy, focusing on schoolwork and grades and other material things. It seemed like this perpetual dream state was what his life was going to be, until his brother Gabriel had come home to find Cas slumped against the kitchen wall, passed out. He spent two days in the hospital with an IV in his arm and telling the clinical parade of doctors and nurses that no, he wasn’t anorexic, he just kept forgetting to eat. Kept forgetting. Forgetting about his present, and looking at the past through burnt sepia and rose-coloured lens until the tears came and melted the pictures. 

Dean showed up the second day that Cas was in the hospital. His jaw was clenched, his hands in fists as he strode in his room, and Cas felt his stomach twist and pull when he saw his dark expression. Dean slumped down on his knees beside the chrome hospital bed, and Cas thought for a moment he was about to shout at him or hit him. Instead, Dean leaned forward and buried his face in Cas’s concave stomach, his breath ghosting through the sheets and burning a circle on Cas’s hipbone.

“Why…the _fuck_ …didn’t you talk to me?” Dean asked, and Cas could tell that his teeth were clenched past endurance. Everything about him was wound so tight he thought his friend might explode right there.

“Dean,” Cas said quietly, and Dean looked up at him so fast that it seemed like just the breeze caused by his movement blew his words away. His eyes were bright, so bright that he’d hung planets in there, the kind with a giant diamond in the core. His face was pale but blotchy, and his freckles stuck out like paint splatters, like tiny islands, little nicks on a marble statue. His hand was in a fist on Cas’s knee, and the knuckles were white, the pink of his thumbnail so bright against the sheet. And he was there, and real, and alive, so alive he seemed to shine. And Cas cried, the one and only time he ever would. Dean reached up and wrapped his arms around Cas’s neck, burying his face in his shoulder. Cas gasped, his eyes darting about the room. It felt like his was being smothered by the universe, so infinite and fast and beating like an exposed heart, and Cas was so cold, a crumpled receipt in the bottom of a trouser pocket that had gone through the wash. Useless and forgotten. But he was being touched by millions of particles on fire with life, and it was overwhelming. Even his tears seemed to burn against his skin. It was terrifying and comforting and painful.

“Watch the IV,” was all he said. And it was all he seemed to need to say.

Things looked so much different after that. Bigger. Brighter. Like he was looking at everything through Dean’s bright emerald eyes. Faceted, pumping, alive. And now it was about to end. It couldn’t have come soon enough, and yet it was supposed to go on forever, one year after the next, ad infinitum, like a swinging pendulum.

“Boys? Time to line up,” came an old, tired voice from the door. Cas didn’t look around to see the owner of the voice. They were interchangeable. He simply looked at Dean raising himself from the wall and followed him, like a ghost following the haunt.

***

There was so little to remember. They had stood up. They sat back down. There were way too many words said for such an unremarkable class. Parents had cried. He vaguely remembered his brothers yelling loudly from the back of the gymnasium. The students hadn’t thrown their mortarboards in the air because they were insured. Cas pulled his robe over his head, glad that he was alone in the dark room. It maintained the finality of the whole situation. The monochrome of it.

There was a creak as the door opened and closed. Cas looked around to see Dean stepping into the room, pulling his mortarboard off and running his fingers through his hair.  
“Damn, I thought it would never end. Are you coming? The class is going out to dinner. I’ll give you a ride if you want.”

“No, I’m fine,” Cas said, turning back towards the wall. If he looked at Dean too long, he might be blinded. “Thanks, though.”

“Come on, Cas, don’t be a recluse,” Dean said, walking forward and throwing his arm around his friend’s shoulders. He leaned his chin on Cas’s shoulder, looking expectantly at him. “What are you thinking? Are you driving yourself crazy in there?”

“It’s over, Dean,” Cas said, turning to face him. His voice had come out harsher than he had expected it to. “It’s over, and…and that’s it. Done. All of it. And everyone’s leaving, I’m leaving, you’re leaving, and…I don’t know. I feel like we’ll never see anyone ever again.”

“Totally not true. You’re stuck with your brothers no matter what you do,” Dean said, grinning. “Just like I’m stuck with Sammy. And you know we’ll still hang out, Cas. You can’t get rid of me either. And how can I forget the man I basically went to prom with because neither of us asked anyone? Who spent a night with you in a locked closet for senior prank day? Who carried your sorry ass across campus when you broke your leg trying to hop the fence? Damn, man, memories like that don’t fade easily.”

Cas bit his lip, staring up at Dean. His tongue brushed the rough skin. “I just don’t want it to end. I feel like it’s the last day of our lives. Like, I want to do something crazy. Is that weird?”

“Hell no, that’s not weird!” Dean said enthusiastically. “I’ve been waiting my whole life to hear those words from you! What do you want to do? We’ll go to a bar and get plastered, and then run naked downtown. We’ll go have sex with whoever will have us. I’ll pay for you to have a meaningful discussion with a prostitute, like _Catcher in the Rye_. Whatever you want, man, anything to get that high school stick out of your ass.”

Cas knitted his eyebrows. His whole brain seemed to be running in circles, spiraling and whizzing like a waterbug. Thinking everything and nothing at once. He couldn’t feel the tips of his fingers, and his toes tingled. He really might actually be going crazy.

“Come on, Cas,” Dean said, putting his hands on Cas’s shoulders and leaning down to look him in the eyes. “What do you want to do?”

It only took a few inches to reach him, but it felt like crossing the universe.

Kissing Dean was not electric, like Cas had thought it would be. There were no sparks, no fire, no spontaneous roses. Actually, it felt slightly numbing, like Dean was a walking morphine drip. There hadn’t really been much finesse in the whole thing, more of a crashing of mouths. Cas’s whole body was stiff and shaking, doing everything he could to remain calm while inside his head he was running in circles screaming. He was breathing too fast, losing feeling in his extremities, like he was suffocating from terror and indecision. _Dean’s not moving. He hates me. Fuck, what have I done?_ But then Dean’s arms closed around Cas, and the world exploded into Technicolor. _I’m like fucking Dorothy in Munchkinland,_ he thought stupidly. But his lips were tingling, and he could have sworn his stomach growled, like he was hungry. How had he never realized that there were so many nerve endings on his body? And now they were all alive and bursting with colour. Fireworks under the skin, blazing under his eyelids. Because Dean was the sun, and Cas was the moon. Dark and light, just as it had always been. But it wasn’t. He was rose-coloured glasses, and Cas was the grey eyes that needed to see. Dean was Midas, and everywhere he touched turned to gold. What did that make Cas? Bacchus. Drunk and bewildered. Fuck it. Let all the water turn to wine. See if he cared.

Dean turned his attention to Cas’s neck, and Cas felt the wall of the empty, dark room press against his back. His robe was itchy, stifling, and his nerve endings needed to breathe. He felt Dean’s tongue on his skin, and his eyes widened. He’d have to tell Dean later that he really did have flowers for breath. Or, at least that’s what it felt like. Cas’s breath was more like a dog panting, fast and panicked.

Dean’s breath was hot and sticky against his skin, like a humid breeze. He closed his eyes, and his lashes brushed against Cas’s cheek. The lightest feeling. Like butterfly wings. And he closed his eyes and reached forward as he cracked open like a vase, and all the colour bled through.

***

Dean was running late. Sam hopped up the steep steps and pushed through the door that marked the boy’s changing room.

“Dean!” he shouted into the darkness. “Are you coming?”

He looked around. Two shadowy figures stood against the wall, one holding the other close, no sound but heavy breathing. Leaning forward, Sam clicked the lights on. His brother stood, his robe hanging half-off his bare shoulder, his hair mussed and eyes glowing. Against the wall, his friend Cas was clutching his robe, looking distraught and bewildered and delighted all at once.

“Did you guys just have sex?”

Dean looked sharply around at his brother. “You’re too young to talk about that, Sammy,” he said, pushing away and picking his mortarboard up off the floor.

“I’m not too young,” Sam said defiantly. “I’m in eighth grade. I know what sex is.”

“Of course you do. But if you use it to get a girl pregnant, I’m going to have to kill you,” Dean said, shrugging nonchalantly.

“Gross,” his brother replied, sticking out a tongue and darting from the room.

Dean looked back at Cas, who smiled weakly and chuckled.

“Dude, you look totally debauched,” Dean said.

“Such a big word,” Cas replied, running a hand through his dark hair, “for someone who was stupid enough to join in on the jock’s bet. Totally immature.”

“Maybe, but damn, what a time saver,” he replied, walking towards the door. He looked around at Cas, the door propped open with his foot. “Well? Are you coming?”

Cas glanced at him. Try as he might, he just couldn’t get his mouth to close. His teeth were going to get frostbite from being exposed so long.

“As long as you give me a ride,” he replied.

“Of course,” Dean said reaching back and grabbing Cas’s hand, pulling him through the door. “Just like on the bus in middle school,” he said, walking down the stairs and dragging Cas behind him.

Cas laughed, and the world seemed to shimmer. Everything was faceted, bright, and lush, like the earth was singing. And still his skin poured colour, overflowing with bubbly champagne stars that lifted him up and expanded his lungs large enough to breathe in the whole atmosphere. How had he spent a year without these colours? They had been gone so long. And here they were, back again, welcoming him to the world of the living. And it was beautiful.


End file.
